The scalper and
Braddock, 32, exchanged profanities. Braddock, a U.S. Army soldier who
lost a leg to a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2005, says he was walking away
when another scalper blindsided him with a punch.

“Somebody warned me,
and I turned around and got popped in the nose,” says Braddock. He
responded by wrestling the scalper to the pavement.

The altercation between Braddock and the scalper may have been unusual for its violence but not its intensity.

Members of the
Timbers Army have been confronting scalpers all season, interrupting the
dealmaking and telling would-be customers the Army offers a ticket
exchange where people can buy tickets at face value.

Some Timbers Army
members say a ticket is akin to a community good that everyone should
have equal access to. And they say scalpers—when they gouge buyers—are
exploiting fans and pricing some out of the market.

This
belief—reflecting devotion among many Army members bordering on a sense
of team ownership—has turned increasingly confrontational.

Many Timbers Army
members have taken after the scalpers like a neighborhood watch group
going after drug dealers on the street corner outside an elementary
school.

“People like to get
up in the scalpers’ face and ask them stupid questions,” says Niall
McCusker, a longtime Timbers fan. “They’ve decided they don’t like
them.”

Braddock confirms he
and others are trying to take away the scalpers’ business. The official
Timbers Army Twitter account says it’s the scalpers who are
antagonistic.

“The city needs to
ban scalpers who are getting more and more aggressive with each game,”
says an April 14 tweet. It also linked to a YouTube video of an alleged
scalper yelling an obscene suggestion at a fan.

He also confirms that
Timbers Army members are interrupting sales. “What you see is a lot of
scalpers are trying to negotiate high prices,” Dittfurth says, “and
someone will walk up and say they’ll sell them at face value. The
scalpers freak out on them.”

Ticket scalping is
legal in Oregon, but in the 1970s, in the heat of the original
Blazermania, Portland banned it for events held at city-owned venues,
such as Jeld-Wen.

That rule has been
difficult to enforce; a Multnomah County district judge struck down part
of the ordinance as unconstitutional in 1988. The judge dismissed the
case against 24-year-old MacDuffie McCool, who was waving two Tina
Turner tickets outside Memorial Coliseum.

Scalping Timbers tickets is a wide-open practice outside Jeld-Wen.

“We don’t devote
resources to where people aren’t complaining,” says Sgt. Pete Simpson, a
Portland Police Bureau spokesman. “If the Timbers were to want a ticket
crackdown, we’d be happy to have that conversation.”

"In the low usage areas, we found that our vehicles sit idle four times longer, ultimately affecting overall vehicle availability for the Portland membership base, as well as parking for the Portland community."

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East Portland can't catch a break.Just this week KGW had a story called, "Diverse, non-cool East Por... More